Staphylococcus aureus is considered the most significant cause of serious infectious diseases in the United States; this is likely to be true world-wide as well. See, Klevens et al., JAMA 298:1763-1771 (2007); and Lowy, N Engl J Med 339:520-532 (1998). Serious illnesses caused by the organism include highly fatal pneumonia, in which as many as 35,000 patients succumb each year, infectious endocarditis, where S. aureus is the cause of up to 20,000 cases (10,000 fatalities, and significant survivor strokes and metastatic abscesses due to microbial clumps seeding the brain and other organs), sepsis where the organism is the second leading cause of bloodstream infections (for example 800,000 post-surgical infections), and osteomyelitis (S. aureus is the cause of nearly all cases). Additionally, S. aureus has become highly antibiotic resistant, with both community-associated and hospital-associated methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) arising.
There have been major efforts by the medical and scientific communities to develop vaccines against S. aureus. However, all of them resulted in failure to date. Thus, there is a need for a vaccine against S. aureus. 